Weird and wonderful objects washed up on the world's beaches shed more
light on the workings of the ocean currents than you might think.

Marooned on an island, if you threw a message-in-a-bottle into the
ocean, would you be saved?
The answer, according to researchers, depends
on where you are.

An interactive map
shows how floating objects dropped into the ocean travel over the
years.
So drop a bottle off the east coast of the US, for example, and
if you’re lucky, it may have reached France, Spain or North Africa after
a couple of years – but equally it could have turned around and been
trapped in an ocean gyre circling around the centre of the Atlantic.

Lego has been washing up on a Cornwall beach for more than a decade (PA)

These strange objects enter the sea via beach litter, rivers and
shipping containers lost overboard.
Not only do they provide a curious
and occasionally disturbing record of humanity’s effects in this era,
they can also provide researchers with surprising insights into the vast
ocean currents that sweep the globe.
A 2014 survey by the World Shipping Council suggests around 2,683 containers were lost at sea per year between 2011 and 2013.
The real figure could well be more, as many go unreported and no single database keeps track.

Perhaps
the most famous case of drifting ephemera was a fleet of more than
28,000 rubber ducks and other bath toys, known as the Friendly Floatees.
The ducks accidentally fell into the Pacific from a container ship en
route from China to Seattle in 1992, and were tracked by the
oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmayer, who called on beachcombers to report sightings.
The Floatees spent over a decade circling on the sea.
What was perhaps
most striking was just how far the ducks travelled, with some ending up
in Europe and Hawaii, and confirmed sightings continued until at least
the mid-2000s.
(See the path the rubber ducks took here.)
This hinted that floating objects take a much longer journey between oceans than previously realized.

Where objects dropped off the French Atlantic coast could end up in 10 years.

Migration routes and landing events of the friendly floatees compiled by seos.

In 1992, around 29000 rubber ducks fell off a cargo ship in the Pacific Ocean.This is where they made landfall.

In 2012, Erik van Sebille of the University of New South Wales in
Australia and colleagues confirmed this suspicion by using a network of
around 20,000 satellite-tracked ‘drifter’ buoys.
They found that there are six major patches of plastic garbage in the oceans:
five in the subtropical seas, and one more high up in the Arctic
Barents Sea that was previously unknown.
And crucially, this work
revealed how the plastic migrates between the patches over long
timescales.
“They are much more connected than ever envisioned,” he
says.
“They leak.”
This research inspired them to create their interactive map.

According to van Sebille, in some regions of the North Pacific there's potentially more weight in plastic than there is in life.
A lot is too buoyant to sink. “It’s almost like the turd that won’t
flush,” he laughs.
Contrary to popular belief, however, the stuff does
not exist as giant islands.
It is dispersed and much of it is ‘microplastic’ – tiny, eroded fragments – and so it’d be near-impossible to go out there and sweep it up.
The danger to wildlife is clear.

Since most of this circulating material does not decompose easily,
eventually it may even wind up in the rock record, deposited on beaches
or in the deep ocean inside fish poo after they have digested it.
Indeed, US researchers recently described a new type of solid rock found
in Hawaii containing plastic bags, rope and bottle tops.
They called it
“plastiglomerate”.

In
the far future, then, geologists curious about 21st Century human
beings will likely wander up to an outcrop, and discover coloured chunks
of plastic embedded within.
Peer closer, and they might even get lucky
and find whole objects, such a Barbie arm, a pair of dentures – or even a
message-in-a-bottle.